Week 5 Representing Canberra – Corey Gray U3044909

Your mission this week is to take any one of the above ideas as a basis for representation. Devise a way to explore/undermine/represent your chosen idea:

·         Driving as an experience that transforms urban space and the people who engage in the experience of driving

·         Driving as irrational and contradictory to the real nature of the city. 

Driving can transform the urban space in ways that are sometimes positive and sometimes negative. In a positive sense driving and the ownership of a car provide many good values including freedom, the ability to get from place to place, and majorly the ability to become independent. The downside, which was experienced by myself today, confides the notion that the shift in urban space can sometimes be indeed invasive. Perhaps taking public transport or even walking may be the better option. Engaging in driving, the difference between being safe and being out of control of the driving experience is millimetres and definitely makes you question its overall transformation. This idea I felt provided a representation of the irrational and contradictory nature driving represents to the city, as anyone engaging in the experience may feel at times unable to control the settings and elements around them. This inhabiting factor provides a contrast into the vast controllable elements a city offers.

Corey Gray

This photograph I feel represents the city ‘Isuara’ in Calvino’s Invisible Cities. This city is told as the city of a thousand wells. Isuara is described to the reader as a place that rises over a deep subterranean lake, very much like the lakes that surround Canberra. I found this city interesting as Calvino’s notion of ‘thin cities’ is described in a way that could truly be used to describe Canberra. For instance, he describes the God’s as people that live in buckets that rise, just like the hot air balloons of the brisk Canberra morning, as the people that inhabit this one could truly relate. I also found that Isuara sounds like a place of constant scaffolding and development, something Canberra inhabitants are all too familiar with. The notion of a City moving entirely upward I feel, is a good representation of Canberra as Calvino’s efforts to relate the reader to Isuara are ones that describe different features not dissimilar to Canberra. For example, windmills - like the famous windmill farm that surrounds Canberra.

By Corey Gray U3044909